Slashdot Mirror
Bill Gates Handwriting Analyzed
Kaal Alexander Rosser writes "The BBC is reporting that a doodle left behind at a Davos press conference given by Tony Blair, Bill Gates and Bono shows the writer to be: "an unstable man" amongst other things. The Gates Foundation has confirmed the doodle was left there by Bill Gates."
i dont know about gates, but his OS is damn unstable.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
are probably nothing more than variations of the $ sign... =)
Here's a look at the actual doodle .
"...all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness..." yada yada
Most of those assessments were made when the "graphologists" in question were under the belief the doodle was Blair's. So we should withhold judgement until we have second opinions from the Phrenologists, Dowsers and any other Pseudo-Scientific Charlatans who feel like chipping in with their worthless, substance less opinions...
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
A spokesman said: "Following the press conference given by the prime minister, Bill Gates and Bono in Davos on Thursday, a number of newspapers printed stories claiming that a page of notes and doodles left behind on the platform belonged to Tony Blair, and provided an insight into the mind of the prime minister.
"They were in fact doodles made by Bill Gates.
"We look forward with amusement to explanations by a variety of psychologists and graphologists of how various characteristics ascribed to the prime minister on the basis of the doodles, such as 'struggling to concentrate', 'not a natural leader', 'struggling to keep control of a confusing world' and 'an unstable man who is feeling under enormous pressure', equally apply to Mr Gates.
"We are astonished that no-one who ran the story thought to ask No 10 if the doodles were in fact Mr Blair's, particularly as it was obvious to anyone the handwriting was totally different."
In other words, graphology is BS and the people who analyzed it already had a preconceived notion about whose it was and made the appropriate BS analyses.
I believe the correct sentiment is "more successful" with technology than girls.
In Soviet Russia, asses suck this joke.
Bono happens to draw comic versions of himself and The Edge fighting evil across the galaxy, and always takes them home to ink and color.
No doubt that Microsoft has some shady business tactics. There's no question that they provide shoddy products from a security perspective and then push responsibility for their goofs to on user community. There's the issue ,of corse, that they hound free software by the cheapest pr tricks in the book and the system Microsoft sucks shit! Well, hell! There's a lot of valid complaints when it comes to chastising Microsoft as a corporation
I really don't want to ideolize Mr. Gates and he is often guilty of wrong speak; willingly or out of ignorance.
But attempting a character analyses from a doodle he left at a conference (which potentially was boring) is just plain juvenile.
Hold your ammunition for the real issues, slashdot, and retain your credibility in the bargain...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
...and the bar tender says, "We don't serve big wigs here like you.".
Tony Blair says, "But can we at least vote on it?".
The bartender says, "No!".
Bill Gates says, "But we just need a place to crash.".
The bartender felt betrayed because he expected support from Bill, and thus said, "You too??".
Bono says, "Yes...".
testing out my trending skills
Tony Blair, Bill Gates and Bono walk into a bar within 5 minutes of one another and sit down.
With an obvious need to one up the other two egos in the room, Tony orders a kamikazi and says, "I know they say the three of us are quite unstable, but I believe I have you chaps beat, even on that front. I overthrew a country on the advice of a Texan." He passes a "one-free-knighting" coupon to the bartender for escro on his challenge.
Gates, drinking a screwdriver and squiggling on a piece of paper, blurts out "It's not like Britain didn't do that to the same people before. Try dominating the world with a collection of buggy software and an army of marketroids. Allow the single most significant collaborative creation of the 20th century to be brought to its knees. Then get back to me". He passes a check totaling the GNP of a small country to the bartendar to see Blair's challenge.
Bono, not even inclined to remove his sunglasses responds passes a black I-pod to the bartender. "You see that blonde, at the end of the bar? I'm going to eat her now." He downs his tequila, walks up the blonde, stabs her repeatedly, then eats her, and returns to the conversation.
The bartender interjects and says to Bono "I don't think your instability counts... after all, you're on drugs, and that makes it artificial." Bono, looking puzzled because he hadn't taken a pill in at least three days says "Hell, I'm not on drugs". The bartender passes the pot to Gates, refills the men's drinks and replies, "of course you are, that was a bar-bitch-you-ate".
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
As the parent notes the story isn't really about doodles by Bill Gates, but about doodles that aren't by Tony Blair. And the ensuing BS because people assumed they were. The only thing remarkable about Gate's involvement is that he's such a clear proof that the graphology is crap. Him being a genius and all.
It's like when 2 students pass in the exact same assignment and get 2 vastly different marks.
It's interesting but why does slashdot care about some doodles? I'm sure most of us don't. It has nothing to do with tech or tech-related news. If, however, there was an improved version of quick sort hidden in the doodles we should all sit up. Is there a way to mod the original articles down?
Wrong, wrong, wrong!
Have you ever met Bill? I have. He most certainly has the geek nature. He most certainly does have a deep understanding of the "how" of technology and asks very penetrating questions if you're demonstrating something to him. He's a good business man too, but don't let that lead you into underestimating his technical abilities.
Paul
Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate
After a couple minutes, they got into the technical part and after Bill had spent two or three minutes looking over stack trace information he abruptly starts screaming at the team about how the memory footprint was too large, and then stopped, thought a minute, and accounting for a dependant project off the top of his head, spit out what he thought was the appropriate memory size for the stack. Everyone in the room stared at him slack-jawed - he quoted a number that was too small by half. No one outside the marketing department would make up a number like that.
But they had an explicit order from BillG to rewrite the stack to that size, so they went back to the drawing board and, after bringing in some more BSD hackers, realized that not only was his number achieveable, but he'd hit the number they could theoretically reach given the dependencies with other portions of the system right on the head. Although that section of NT has been revisitted in every version since NT4.0, no one has been able to improve on the memory footprint of that section of the kernel.
That's not neccesarily the sign of a genius - I know people who can look at a database and give the same sort of summary judgements. But when a man can make realizations like that within 10 minutes of having learned about a technology, at a bare minimum you have to give him credit for being a geek.